News

InfoQ interviewed Dan North about the activities that are performed by database administrators and how they are related to those done by developers and by operations, how database administration is usually organized, how the database fits into DevOps or Continuous Delivery, and what he expects that the future will bring for database administration when organizations adopt DevOps.

One of the attractions dynamic languages possess is the ability to easily support a REPL for quick code experimentation. The open source CShell project brings a powerful REPL environment to C# users, allowing them to combine their knowledge of C# with the speed a REPL provides for exploring code.

Web Workbench, the extension that brings Sass, LESS, and Coffeescript to Visual Studio, has been updated. This release adds support for Visual Studio 11, improvements to the import process and collapsible outlining for CoffeeScript.

MacRuby 0.5 has been released, with a new VM, AOT and JIT support. The GIL MacRuby inherited from Ruby 1.9 is now gone and Grand Central Dispatch support allows to keep a system's cores busy with Ruby threads.
Work on the 0.6 release is already under way; a new debugger feature is already available in the trunk.

Lua is a scripting language that can be embedded in any application that can provide hooks for its C API. Version 2.0 of its JIT compiler is in Beta and includes a completely re-written VM based on a trace compiler and an interpreter written in assembler.

InfoQ caught up with the creator of Ruby 1.9.x's VM Koichi Sasada to talk about what's coming for Ruby 1.9.2, the state of the Global Interpreter Lock (or Global VM Lock) and what it'll take to get a generational GC in 1.9.x.

MacRuby is steadily moving forward, with a usable Ahead of Time (AOT) compiler coming closer on the experimental branch, which should make Ruby a first class language for Cocoa applications. Also: a look at Dr Nic's ChocTop utility for creating MacOS DMG files.

The Android Scripting Environment (ASE) project adds scripting functionality to Android. The native versions of languages like Lua and Python can script Android APIs exposed via JSON-RPC. Support for Ruby, as well as JVM-based languages is planned as well.